In Australian suburbs it’s relatively common to have an unmarked crossing area with a kerb cut/lowered kerb on one side of the road and a driveway (to a residential house) with a somewhat lowered kerb roughly opposite it.
For people with prams the practical path is to cross the road and walk up the driveway (maybe also an option of wheelchair users?). For walkers, it’s probably to step up the kerb and walk across the grass.
How should this crossing be tagged? As an unmarked crossing passing next to the driveway? Should it be connected to the driveway? Something else entirely?
I’d map the driveway so that pedestrian routers can decide whether to take a shortcut that follows the driveway. (Most would, it seems.) Remember to map a kerb=* node along the driveway so wheelchair routers can penalize or avoid it as necessary.
And in many cases, the opposing driveway isn’t as well lined up as this one.
I feel like common sense states that if the misalignment is more than the width of the road it wouldn’t be worth tagging - but it’s not a discussion I’ve seen.
And can you recommend a way to check what pedestrian routers will do?
That’s how I’d do it. I suppose you could make the crossing and driveway meet at a point, but in this case, it isn’t entirely clear that the driveway is intended to be a continuation of the crossing, so I would probably leave it as is. That way, a router has an opportunity to describe the little shuffle to the side.
You can test pedestrian routing in three major routing engines by clicking the directions button next to the search bar on the osm.org homepage. OpenRouteservice offers a wheelchair routing profile.
My assumption is that the driveway is only tagged access=private if there’s a specific reason and not just an assumption on the mapper’s part. For example, in the U.S., access=private is generally supposed to be used when there’s a gate or a Posted or No Trespassing sign – when using the driveway to visit the house at the end could constitute trespassing. So if the driveway is legitimately access=private, then a router should avoid using the driveway. That said, Amazon Logistics applied access=private indiscriminately at first and lots of that mistagging still lingers.
I think, we need to overthink the driveway taggen. Split the driveway parts.
The part from the sidewalk to the carriageway is probably all part of the road, governments owned. I think, that we should tag this part service=driveway_link (orange).
So that that routers can decide not to route over a service=driveway(blue) for all kind of transportation. service=driveway_link can only have access, what is on the main road. At the owners property, the access could change, what the owners wish.
Hm, OK. That differs from American suburbs, where generally the property extends to the centerline of the street and there’s an easement for the street itself, the sidewalk, and perhaps some utility boxes. Anyways, what I was saying is that, by default, none of the driveway would be access=private, so there’s no need to split hairs about parts of a driveway. If that’s inaccurate and driveways are generally something like access=permissive or access=private in Australia, then just split the driveway in two and add appropriate access tags, but I don’t see a need for a special service=driveway_link tag.
I’ve rarely seen driveways with access permission tags in Australia, unless it’s explicitly signposted, normally for an apartment complex - so similar to US in that regard.
The bit I’m overthinking is the unmarked crossing which technically only connects to (doesn’t cross) the road. Is there a more accurate semantic tag?
